Digital Apophenia
Digital Apophenia
Master Project
- MAIAD 26
The project begins with a reframing: what if an AI “hallucination” isn’t a failure, but a glimpse into how a machine perceives? The machine fills in what it cannot know [the same way we always have], reaching into everything it has been shown to produce the most plausible continuation. This is not error; it is architecture.
Digital Apophenia proposes that AI hallucination is a distinct cognitive mode native to machine intelligence, shaped by a training world where past and present exist simultaneously. Borrowing from Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt — the idea that every creature inhabits its own perceptual world — the thesis treats these so-called errors not as bugs to fix, but as evidence of a machine’s particular way of seeing. What we dismiss as malfunction becomes a window into the machine’s own perceptual world: hyper-dimensional, associative, dream-like. Around that world, the project builds one of its own.
author/s
